Snapchat's Added a New Custom Geofilters Creation Tool Along with Functional Updates

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Back in February, Snapchat announced a new custom Geofilters option which enables users to create their own Snapchat filter for a business or event - like, say, someone's birthday.

Custom Geofilters have proven both popular and beneficial - on-demand filters can be purchased for as little as $5 (dependent on options selected) and as highlighted recently by Social Media Today contributor Carlos Gil, their audience reach can be significant.

The text is small, but that's 214,000 views for $5.97

But custom filters are also not particularly easy to make, and while it's great if you have the design skills to make a filter like these:

What you might actually end up with is something like this:

Luckily, Snapchat now has a solution, offering a new desktop Geofilter creation tool which can help with the process, offering a range of templates and tools to build your own custom overlay.

To get started, you log in with your Snapchat details and select how you want to build your Geofilter.

If you select "Create Online", you'll be taken to a new listing of templates to choose from related to various types of events.

Once you've selected all your customization options, you can choose the date range in which you want the filter available, and the geolocation required via Google maps.

Snapchat will then give you a price, based on your chosen options, and you can place your order - easy as pie.

It's a helpful, functional addition that will no doubt lead to a lot more people signing up to try our custom Geofilters in future.

At the same time, Snapchat has also released a new update which improves some of its in-app functions and tools.

The new options added are:

The ability to change the style of text to italic, bold, and underlined.

A new option to pin captions to a part of a video, the way you can with stickers.

You can also now view another users Story before you add them as a friend (if they've set their account to public) and Lenses can now be activated with one quick tap, as opposed to holding your finger down on screen.

They're relatively simple, small additions - and, of course, everyone's waiting for Snapchat's counter-punch to Instagram's introduction of "Stories". None of these quite qualify as a response in that regard, but still, helpful additions that boost the app's functionality - and an interesting step towards improved discovery, which Instagram is also pushing with their addition of recommended Stories to their Explore page.

As normal, Snapchat has rolled out these additions quietly, with no official announcement on the Snapchat blog or their Twitter profile. That low-key approach adds to the exclusive appeal of the app - Snapchat lets such updates permeate through user groups naturally, enabling their audience to share and demonstrate new functions amongst themselves. It'll be interesting to see if that approach continues now that Instagram is aggressively muscling in on their turf, and it'll be interesting, too, to see what bigger tricks Snapchat has up its sleeve to combat Facebook's challenge.